Now that I’ve discussed the basics of Facebook marketing for fashion brands, it’s time to actually delve into creating effective campaigns that increase web traffic, make your customer base grow and generate revenue.

In his article, Five Ways To Optimize Your Facebook Marketing, Daniel Flamberg says, “Very few brands can or will report measurable results in awareness or sales as of Facebook campaigns.” He goes on to tell brands and retailers that Facebook is an empty pipeline, not an ongoing party.

So what that means for fashion brands is that in order to generate awareness and sales with Facebook, you are going to have to create connections that will literally inspire interaction.

How Can Fashion Brands and Retailers Create Connections That Inspire Interaction?

1. Identify goals. What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Some questions you might ask yourself: Do you want to reach new customers? Do you want to build brand awareness? Or is it that you want to build a community to gain insight into consumer sentiment towards your brand?

Figure out what job your branded website will play. How will it relate or not relate to the Facebook audience?  Will you use YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Flickr or LinkedIn to reinforce or extend the message and the brand promise to specific segments or target subsets or will it be used as a straight frequency extender or as an exclusive platform for a specific message or offer? Also how will you drive traffic and get your message to the intended audience?  – Daniel Flamberg

Once you’ve determined your goals, you can assign unique objectives specifically related to Facebook and integrate them into your overall marketing strategy.

Gap Holiday Cheer Tab

2. Differentiate yourself from everyone else. Okay, now that you’ve developed your Facebook page, you have to distinguish yourself from the hundreds of brands that also have pages. You have to show a little personality.

There are over 55,000 applications on the Facebook platform and a relatively large portion of them can be directly integrated into your fan page (each application that you add to your fan page adds a tab to the top of your page). Use these applications (or develop your own) to create unique experiences.

AllFacebook recommends that larger brands develop a more robust experiences for their fans, “Games, quizzes, and other types of dynamic content in general can help keep users on your Facebook page for longer durations of time. As you know, we live in an attention economy and that means you want to get all the attention you can from consumers. One thing you should make sure is that your application has a call to action so that when a new user lands on the page they are immediately engaged.”

One tip that I love (thank you Nick O’Neill) is not letting users land on a branded page’s wall. Why?  When someone comes to your page and they’ve never been there before, the wall is usually their first introduction to other people and their products. It’s better to have new visitors enter a controlled environment and browse through less controlled content on their own; you’re more likely to retain the user and convert them to becoming a fan. For those brands wanting some control over their image, here’s a place where you can kindly direct and court your user (Kate Spade does a perfect job with this).

Kate Spade Facebook Landing Page

3. Get Hip To Facebook Advertising. Facebook enables brands, retailers and individual professionals to engage in targeted marketing via Facebook ads. When Facebook users fill out their profiles they enter information such as their hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows.

All of those words are accumulated and used to create demographic profiles. These profiles help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

When you use Facebook ads, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to establish the best ROI on your advertising budgets.

Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.

Brands and retailers can use Facebook data to analyze customer demographics; the Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and click-throughs. Knowing if an ad is working can be established in as little as 24 hours. If audiences aren’t responding, you can pull it and try another variation.

Kermit Patterson’s How To Market Your Business With Facebook offers great examples of how regional businesses including Sprinkles Cupcakes is using Facebook to drive sales.

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